PRESCOTT, Ariz. -- Nostalgic for
simpler days, retired astrophysicist Chuck Adams is translating classics
of boys' lit into a language he fears is going the way of kit radios and
marbles: Morse code.

Holed up in his high-desert home
crammed with computers, radio receivers and a very patient wife, Mr.
Adams uses homemade software to download online books with expired
copyrights, convert the typed words into Morse code tones and record
them on compact discs he sells on the Internet.

1

So far, Mr. Adams says he has sold
or donated thousands of Morse versions of such novels as Edgar Rice
Burroughs's "At the Earth's Core," Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," and
H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine." In about an hour his software can take
any book in the public domain and turn it into a string of digital dits
and dahs; last weekend, he turned out a version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's
- .... . / -... . .- ..- - .. ..-. ..- .-.. / .- -. -.. / -.. .- -- -. .
-.. (a.k.a., "The Beautiful and Damned").

For the 65-year-old Mr. Adams, it's
a labor of love, mixed with equal parts hope and despair. "Morse code is
going to die off unless you can talk someone into coming into the
hobby," he says.

"I do it because it's fun, and to
keep it going," he says. Then he adds in the next breath: "But I have no
delusions of grandeur that I can save Morse code from extinction. I'm
not Don Quixote. I'm not going to go out and fight windmills."

Mr. Adams grew up in Wink, a blink
of a town in West Texas. Six-foot-six himself, he shared a small bedroom
with his three younger brothers, each of whom measures nearly 7 feet
tall. He hand-built his first bike with parts from a junkyard and flew
model rockets high above Wink while the Soviets flew Sputnik even
higher.

Michael M. Phillips

Chuck Adams taps out a
message.

And, at the age of 15 -- inspired by
his father, a ham-radio operator -- he taught himself Morse code from a
book. At the time, ham operators had to transcribe Morse code at a rate
of five words per minute in order to earn the most basic federal
license. Soon young Mr. Adams was spending every night sending coded
messages to anyone who could hear them, and eavesdropping on UPI news
dispatches broadcast to ships.

Too Twangy

Many other radio amateurs use voice
transmissions, but Mr. Adams preferred code, because of the challenge --
and because he thinks his voice is too high and his West Texas accent
too twangy.

Mr. Adams completed a Ph.D., won
tenure at the University of North Texas, worked high-powered jobs in the
defense and computer industries, and dabbled in the professional poker
circuit. But he never lost his love for Morse code.

The code is the creation of a
painter, Samuel F.B. Morse, who needed a way to transmit messages over
the telegraph that he and Alfred Vail had invented. In 1844, the men
famously sent a transmission from Washington to Baltimore that read,
"What hath God wrought?"

The telegraph soon replaced the pony
express. As late as World War II, ham operators found themselves using
their Morse skills as radiomen in the military. During the Vietnam War,
POW Jeremiah Denton, later a U.S. senator from Alabama, blinked
"T-O-R-T-U-R-E" in Morse code when his captors put him on television.

But over time, the telephone and
satellites have rendered Morse code almost obsolete. "If the satellites
go out and power goes out, Morse code can still get through," says Nancy
Kott, president of a code club called FISTS -- someone who sends good
code has "a good fist." "All we need is a battery and two wires to tap
together, and we can communicate."

MORSE CODE

A

.-

B

-...

C

-.-.

D

-..

E

.

F

..-.

G

--.

H

....

I

..

J

.---

K

-.-

L

.-..

M

--

N

-.

O

---

P

.--.

Q

--.-

R

.-.

S

...

T

-

U

..-

V

...-

W

.--

X

-..-

Y

-.--

Z

--..

In February, the Federal
Communications Commission eliminated the Morse requirements for
ham-radio licenses. Mr. Adams resigned from a ham-operators organization
because of what he saw as its flaccid defense of Morse code.

"It is a sad state of affairs when
the U.S. doesn't even attempt to keep the language alive or give an
incentive to work on it," says Mr. Adams.

Many of those who still know Morse
code test their skills with a German computer game called Rufz, the
standard for determining world transcription-speed rankings. Players
listen to coded, five-character call signs, combinations of letters,
symbols and numbers that identify individual license holders. The faster
and more correctly they type them, the more points they score.
(Transcribing regular text is much slower.)

Last month in Belgrade, Goran
Hajosevic broke 200 words per minute -- an extraordinary pace. Mr. Adams
is tied for eighth in the world, at more than 140 words per minute.

Scanning the list recently of the 60
fastest Morse coders under the age of 20, Mr. Adams spotted just two
with American-issued call signs. "What this shows me is in the United
States, we have no one who's interested in learning Morse code anymore,"
he lamented.

Mr. Adams and other Morse
aficionados don't speak of dots and dashes; that imagery is too visual,
and Morse is an aural language. So they prefer to describe the language
in dits and dahs, the sounds of the short and long tones. A, for
instance, is dit dah. B is dah dit dit dit, or simply dah dididit.
Between two letters, the sender allows a three-dit silence. Between
words it grows to seven dits.

'In the Zone'

Like all Morse experts, Mr. Adams
rarely breaks signals down into letters, instead hearing complete words
much as readers recognize words on a page. When he transcribes a message
at high speeds, his fingers are five or 10 words behind his ears. When
he is "in the zone" he isn't even conscious of what he is transcribing,
he says. He has to read it later to understand the message.

When he listens to one of his books,
the code is like a voice speaking to him. "It's like you don't count the
i's when someone says Mississippi," he explains.

Paddle-style key and
radio used to send Morse code.

He produces his audio books to play
at different speeds, depending on the expertise of the buyer. Ken
Moorman's bedtime listening is Mr. Adams's 25-word-per-minute version of
"The War of the Worlds," which he purchased for $10.50. "It's so much
easier to pick up a microphone and yell," says Mr. Moorman, a
65-year-old retired electrical engineer in Williamsburg, Va., and a
coder since 1957. "The people who do [Morse code] today do it because
it's a lost art."

Earlier this year, Mr. Adams sent
Barry Kutner, a 50-year-old ophthalmologist from Newtown, Pa., and
another world-class coder, a 100-words-per-minute version of the book.
To Mr. Adams's chagrin, Mr. Kutner wrote an email back pointing out that
the gap between words was eight dits long, instead of the prescribed
seven. At that pace, a dit lasts 1.2 one-thousandths of a second.

Much as he did growing up in Texas,
Mr. Adams enjoys sitting in front of a gray radio, not much bigger than
a hardcover book, and sending code with a $500, Italian,
stainless-steel, paddle-style key that he operates with a pinching
motion. With the slightest touch of his right thumb on one paddle, the
key sends an audible dit. A touch of his right pointer finger on the
other paddle sends a dah.

Keeping Busy

His wife, Phyllis, 62, doesn't
begrudge him his long hours in front of the radio. "I'm just glad he has
something to keep him busy," she says. "All my friends with retired
husbands complain they follow them around the house all day."

One recent Sunday morning, Mr.
Adams's radio came alive with Morse tones. It was a guy named Gary
McClain in Pryor, Okla. The transmissions were pretty slow, just 22
words per minute.

Mr. McClain, a 65-year-old retired
mill worker, learned Morse code in the Boy Scouts half a century ago. He
had nothing urgent in mind; he just wanted to make contact with someone
far away.

"Weather here is cloudy and chance
of showers," he tapped, as Mr. Adams transcribed the words in a
notebook.

Mr. McClain signed off, and the
radio went silent. "It will eventually die," Mr. Adams mused. "I'll hate
to see it go. I won't have anybody to talk to. I'll have to go
back to reading."

John Fore, left, and David B. Leeson, both members of the Stanford Amateur Radio
Club at the station at Stanford University.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

With thumb and forefinger barely touching
the two metal ends of a Morse paddle, a ham operator unleashes a stream of dits
and dahs.

The language of dots and dashes has been the lingua franca
of amateur radio, a vibrant community of technology buffs and hobbyists who have
provided a communications lifeline in emergencies and disasters.

But that community has been shaken by news that the
government will no longer require Morse Code proficiency as a condition for an
amateur license. It was deemed dispensable in part because other modes of
communicating over ham radio, like voice, teletype and even video, have grown in
popularity.

While the decision had been expected, some ham radio
operators fear that their exclusive club has been opened to the unwashed masses
— and that the very survival of Morse Code is in question.

“It’s part of the dumbing down of America,” said Nancy
Kott, editor of World Radio magazine and a field representative for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
in Metamora, Mich. “We live in a society today that wants something for
nothing.”

A woman in a mostly male world, Ms. Kott is one of about
660,000 licensed ham operators in the United States and is the American leader
of Fists CW Club, an organization that calls itself the International Morse
Preservation Society. (An “open fist” was the hand position typically used by
telegraph operators when sending Morse, which is sometimes called Continuous
Wave, or CW. And in ham radio slang, someone who sends fine code is said to have
a good fist.)

Within 48 hours after the Federal Communication
Commission’s move this month to drop the Morse requirement, a discussion on
www.eham.net ran more than 380
messages and 57,000 words long, the equivalent of a short novel. The postings
were divided roughly evenly between those lamenting and praising the
commission’s decision.

“CW is just another mode and should not be afforded any
special priority over others,” wrote K4UUG, who like many radio aficionados
identified himself online using his radio call sign. “Proficiency should not be
required for those who do not wish to use the mode.”

As part of its decision to eliminate the Morse
requirement, the commission made essentially the same point.

Inside a hilltop trailer above Stanford University in Palo
Alto, Calif., a couple of veteran coders seemed to be taking the commission’s
decision in stride earlier this week. In a room cluttered with electronic
equipment, they translated the dits and dahs that beeped in the background at
dizzying speed, the chatter between someone in Canada, VE6NL to be precise, and
someone off the coast of Antarctica, VP8CMH.

“It’s a bit like a foreign language,” said W6LD, whose
real name is John Fore, a securities lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati,
a prominent Silicon Valley firm. “You learn it and it’s fun to use it.”

With thumb and forefinger barely touching the two metal
ends of a Morse paddle, W6NL, a k a David B. Leeson, unleashed his own stream of
dits and dahs with the ease of a virtuoso, joining the global conversation. “I
fell head over heels for amateur radio when I was 4 or 5 years old and heard
Morse Code signals from afar at the station of a 14-year-old,” said Mr. Leeson,
69, a consulting professor of engineering at Stanford. “I still remember the
thrill.”

The thrill turned into a hobby, and the hobby turned into
a career in technology. In 1968, Mr. Leeson founded California Microwave, once a
thriving telecommunications equipment company but now defunct. Now radio and
Morse are just for fun, said Mr. Lesson, who is faculty adviser to the Stanford
Amateur Radio Club, which once counted William R. Hewlett and David Packard as
members.

Mr. Leeson and Mr. Fore are both active in radio contests,
48-hour competitions in which hams try to contact as many other hams as
possible, often using Morse. Mr. Leeson has a station in the Galapagos Islands,
where he goes several times a year with his wife, Barbara (K6BL), for contests.
They once contacted as many as 17,000 other hams in a weekend. Mr. Fore, who is
50, and got his first license when he was 10, has a station in Aruba.

They embody the kind of utility-free passion for Morse
that the futurist Paul Saffo said would ensure its survival.

“Freed from all pretense of practical relevance in an age
of digital communications, Morse will now become the object of loving passion by
radioheads, much as another ‘dead’ language, Latin, is kept alive today by
Latin-speaking enthusiasts around the world,” Mr. Saffo, a fellow at the
Institute for the Future, wrote in his blog.

Morse Code was first devised in the 1830s for use with the
telegraph. It later became an essential part of civilian, maritime and military
radio communications. But the military has largely abandoned its use in favor of
newer technologies, and the Coast Guard stopped listening for Morse S O S
signals at sea during the 1990s.

The F.C.C. first lifted the Morse Code requirement for
entry-level licenses in 1991. It later dropped proficiency requirements for
higher-level licenses to five words a minute, from 20. And after international
regulations stopped mandating knowledge of it in 2003, it was only a matter of
time until Morse Code was no longer required in the United States. The
requirement will formally be phased out sometime next year.

The demise of the Morse requirement, however, could be a
boon for ham radio itself. After the F.C.C.’s decision, the American Radio Relay
League, an organization representing ham radio operators, said demand for
information about radio licenses surged from about 200 in a typical weekend to
about 500.

“We are very pleased to see that,” said David Sumner
(K1ZZ), the league’s chief executive.

That is no consolation for the most avid defenders of
Morse.

“There is something magical about being able to put two
wires together and start going dit-dit-dit dit-dit,” said Ms. Kott, or WZ8C. “We
are just going to have to get on the air and do what we do and hope for the
best.”